It turns out being polite can come at a cost afterall — but in the case of ChatGPT, it’s far more than you might have thought.
Every time you fire off a little “thank you” or “please” to OpenAI’s chatbot, you’re not just showing good manners — you’re supposedly racking up a bill that runs into the tens of millions of dollars.
That’s at least the case according to OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, who gave that rough measurement as an answer when replying to the above answer on an X post — the user of which was wondering how much such a politeness figure adds to the cost of running the AI’s models.
In response, Altman said: "tens of millions of dollars well spent--you never know".
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In spite of the advanced features that chatbots like ChatGPT use, it turns out running those programs is seriously expensive in terms of processing power, electricity and the amount of water required to keep servers cool.
Specifically, even having ChatGPT’s GPT-4 model write a 100-word email — whether that’s to quickly say ‘thanks’ to your boss or whip up a quick cover letter — can require 519mm of water at a time, which is slightly more than a bottle’s worth.
Revealed in a study conducted by the University of California, and reported by The Washington Post, requiring this much water is because each ChatGPT prompt “flows through a server that runs thousands of calculations to determine the best words to use in a response”.
The servers for programmes like ChatGPT are housed in data centres, which generate large amounts of heat — a lot more than is usually generated by typical PCs, laptops, and smartphones.
Water cooling is more effective than air cooling since it can dissipate heat much faster, then taking the heat from servers “into cooling towers to help it escape the building, similar to how the human body uses sweat to keep cool”.
With that, throwing additional polite prompts at ChatGPT can cause the models to run additional processes to elicit more human-level responses — thus, causing those even higher costs Altman has referred to.
That seems to have been confirmed in a Microsoft WorkLab interview with Microsoft Copilot design director, Kurt Beavers, who said: "Using polite language sets a tone for the response".
He added: "when it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back".
The UoC study does show that the specific costs in the US vary depending on the state, since water and electricity resources have varying levels of scarcity. Be that as it may, it still makes for quite the cost altogether.
From one perspective, this larger cost can be worth it due to its resulting enhancement of the AI-user experience. On the other hand, studies like those by OpenAI and MIT have raised concerns that people are becoming too attached, warning that some people may become “emotionally dependent” or even addicted to AI chatbots.
With conversations feeling more and more human, pulling away could even cause “withdrawal symptoms”.
Either way, the next time you wrap up a conversation with ChatGPT and type out a quick “thanks,” just know that bit of courtesy is doing more than making you look polite.